


glenn was

by joeri



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Fraldarius Brothers, Gen, Lowercase, Monologue
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-26
Updated: 2019-09-26
Packaged: 2020-10-28 12:41:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,534
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20778746
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/joeri/pseuds/joeri
Summary: where cain can’t even have the satisfaction of killing abel.





	glenn was

my brother was a foul thing, foul mouthed and endlessly loved. i wished i was more like him, once, at a time in my life when we’d pull apart chicken bones in the kitchen and beg upon them.

brother of mine, son of a bastard and son of a witch more powerful than we could know. glenn knew our mother, of course and knew what a black magic woman she was. she died before i had an inkling of her. i was not taught to use magic. rodrigue said my brother got her ire, her nature.

rodrigue has always been a match and our mother was the resulting fire. he stokes embers in everyone: that is to say he pisses everyone off.

i hate him to death and i should mean it when i say it.

glenn didn’t. he wanted to, i imagine but wouldn’t while i was around. he’d slam the door to near shattering on the old bastard and kick a hole through the wall until he’d find i was there in the corner of the bed.

god, the way he’d plop down in front of me with his knuckles all bloody, leave me glancing at the wall where the wall had turned red and say, “what a cock, huh?” i’d mutter it back like a secret, “yeah, a cock.” right.

can’t be a secret when he’d just screamed it louder than real cocks at dawn. can’t be a secret when he cries at night.

i’ve never seen dad cry. my father isn’t a real man. i’d convinced myself of such when the time came for such an observation to serve me.

but glenn loved him. so did dimitri. so did i. glenn had his wavy hair pulled back into a long horse tail and a freckled face only our mother could be to blame for. dad had the same hair. mine is something straighter.

when glenn swung his sword i could swear every particle of air should dance along or be diced down to their fundamental elements, meant to be destroyed, consequence to his destiny. no enemies could survive it. i was no different, though swordplay i did learn before my own name could be spelt. cursive was hard but not reps, not learning foot stances, not perfecting a boar’s tooth.

dimitri was a natural at it, at the boar’s tooth: a guard against a strike in which your sword is positioned in front of your right leg, extended, and once you shove their blade you can position yours successfully at their throat.

_a natural._

back when calling him a boar was a word of endearment. back before he made me sick as a dog.

he gave up sword technique for the lance after the tragedy anyways, like the spit a sow like him should roast on.

when i swing my sword, not a yardstick nor a mile can measure the gaps in between us, between my brother and i. what i would not give to best him once, not get thrown into the dirt like vomit. i vomited a lot. the hilt of his blade would strike my solar plexus with a deftness i lacked. he’d laugh if i choked, pick me back up and wipe the spit from my chin.

glenn would slice me down and make me cry, but glenn had a soft voice. glenn told me great tales at night.

if i had to describe glenn, i’d call him: “garden-variety bastard,” good at everything and mad as if he was owed something better by it. he respected not a soul but those who could tear him apart. i fancied myself the sole exception but couldn’t care for it.

see, children like me don’t understand.

he loved me despite my weakness and smallness. my weakness and smallness were unchangeable facts. he fought me with pride but sprinkled vulnerary on my split knees, cut lips.

in other words: i was no threat to him. in other words: i wished him dead.

oh abel, oh abel. i couldn’t even be the one to do it.

all the things i wished my father would say of me: what a great knight, what a great boy, what a great son, what a great weapon of the court, of the king, what a great body to bury.

_father, do you see where your son lays?_

six feet beneath the earth there are shards of body belonging to a boy i once knew and i can’t even recognize them as the knight who could’ve slain me a hundred times over but loved me too much to do so, as if my dirty soul hadn’t questioned if i could win a single time _would i stop?_ the world became bleak and rot and rain and it all should be ugly but it’s not.

it’s nothing it hadn’t been all along.

children say stupid things. children ask for things they don’t want. children get jealous and mean and hurt and _grotesque_ and if nothing else i can say i hate dimitri for acting on his sin and then trying to hide it. _do a better job of reigning it in like everybody else._

my brother won’t come back.

i plucked the bones from all manner of poultry and broke them wishing for life, for the dead to come alive. if i could pluck the sleep from your eyes and aliven you again, i would unwish your death. i would win the right way.

this is no victory to me, brother. you abandoned the fight. our score will never be settled when your sword is fragmented upon the rocks where now a little cross sits with shame, where dimitri watched you expire, where dimitri lost what mind he had and where dimitri lost you and lost me.

it’s where i lost you both and you’d _think_ that our father would come to me like a cloak, like a lantern in a night gone full dark no stars

but he did not.

brother, he never came for me.

brother, do you know what they say about you? ingrid misses you terribly, laments of your great deeds with little knowledge that you perished for those ideals that she upholds so dear. a fool to think that you would have her do the same. a fool to think that should you have lived, you’d have regretted the choice.

father says he would have disowned you, disgusted. father says you would’ve been too distraught to go on. father says you couldn’t have handled making the decision to have abandoned your cause.

father says a lot of shit but i know what you really think.

_nothing, because you’re dead._

you’re a thing in the ground and you’re a thing that isn’t you anymore, because you’re dead.

father, do you know what glenn thinks about all this? do you know what glenn would’ve done if he were still here? _don’t go senile already._ glenn has nothing to say because glenn is not here, but that won’t stop you from putting words in his mouth which is a fucking shame when his jaw was lopped clean from his skull and it can’t hold a single shitty syllable anymore.

do you see?

his body was cut to pieces and father, you can’t unsee the image. you can’t even see me.

at least dimitri in all of the right places in his mind knows that glenn died like a bastard, like a fucker in pure pain. i’ve heard him swap words with ingrid over it and she might not like it but it’s the truth and you know it.

and i can’t even mourn.

no, i can’t even mourn it when everyone else is constantly doing it for me. there’s enough heartache over you to drive me delirious and fuck up my stomach. there’s no room for my grief. there’s no space for my emotion when everyone else’s always crowd up the air and choke me down. i am nothing to ingrid but the brother of her lover. i am nothing to dimitri but the brother of his first crush. i am nothing to my father and the fucking sentence stops there.

_i wish i had a body of my own but it was buried with you four years ago._

he died so loved and exalted, held up as a monument to knighthood as if he wouldn’t have despised it all. he surely died as he lived, second to the king and so maybe it gives me hope after all. for as much as glenn was loved, his life too paled in comparison to the prince, little mitya the boar, so it isn’t a surprise when i’m treated the same.

i wish we were the same but there will always be a gap.

glenn was a warm embrace sneaking green beans on my plate. glenn was a sharp finger in my ear with some spit on it and a jeer. glenn was an heir to house fraldarius but i hardly remember that. glenn is loved and dead and now that’s all anyone talks about anymore.

in comparison i am a foul thing, foul mouthed and begging to be loved.

i wish i was more like him.


End file.
